I digress.

Readings: "Epiphenomenal Qualia" by Frank Jackson, and "What Experience Teaches" by David Lewis Issue: Lewis's Ability Hypothesis--a counterexample? As far as I understand, the Ability Hypothesis objection that Lewis brings to Jackson is in a way adopting a Skinnerian understanding of what knowledge is--that the knowledge of the experience of red "just is the possession of these abilities to rem..

On Thomas Nagel's "What is it like to be a bat?" I do agree with Nagel that the subjective character of conscious experience is the crux of mental states, and that at first glance it does not easily admit of reduction to physical or causal-functional properties. However, despite the seeming intractability of such subjective character, I nonetheless think that we can be rather optimistic about wh..

Issue: Understanding defined as capability seems to justify the systems+robot reply There seem to be two distinct senses of understanding that may be relevant (and lacking for the man) in the Chinese room thought experiment--an intentional aspect that connects the syntactical elements to semantics, and the cognitive phenomenology aspect of understanding ("what it feels like to understand," if an..

Suggestion: Spatiotemporal grain of functional/causal realization? I do think that Block presents a strong intuitive (="prima facie") reason not to accept functionalist accounts of mental states. As is defined, it seems that functionalism, or machine-state functionalism, cannot adequately provide reasons for rejecting that the homunculi-headed brain or the system of Chinese nationals have mental..

For this assignment, I'd like you to explain in 1-2 pages ( between 300 and 500 words) where Huxley diverges from Descartes, whether in his reasoning, his assumptions, or his evidence. For Descartes, his main corpus of evidence are the results of introspection and meditation, and his main mode of reasoning can be characterized as being deductive and principle based. On the contrary, Thomas Huxle..

For this reading, you might think about the methodological perspective with its focus on behavior that is displayed (in different ways) by both Turing and Skinner. What are its virtues and weaknesses? What, if anything, do such behaviorist commitments leave out? Or, to ask the question from the other side, why should we care about anything beyond what is capable of generating behavioral conseque..

Most criticisms of the imitation game focus on the insufficiency of the game as a criterion of thinking; in other words, they say that there is more to thinking than just being able to pass the imitation game and satisfy Turing's operational definitions. But I thought of the following case which points out the limitation of the imitation game from another perspective, namely that the imitation m..

이제 웬만하면 쓰는 글들을 블로그에도 업데이트 해둬야겠다. 수업 과제부터 고고링 Issue: on the incompleteness of Huxley's explanation with regards to free will In his discussion of the hypothesis that animals are automata, Huxley proposes a version of epiphenomenalism, which can be summarized as the view that "the consciousness of brutes would appear to be related to the mechanism of their body simply as a collateral product of it..

*모두가 항상 만장일치를 이룰순 없다. 그래서 조정·협의·반목·적대로서의 정치가 가능해진다. *우리는 세계에 대해 모든 것을 알 수 없다. 그래서 객관적 대상 탐구로서의 과학이 가능해진다. *우리는 타자와 합일할 수 없다. 그래서 타자를 향한 마주침으로서의 사랑이 가능해진다. 유한성은 인간의 역량을 한계짓지만 동시에 인간의 과업을 규정짓는다.완전한 이상(理想)의 불가능성은 그 이상을 향한 무한한 도전의 조건, 즉 가능성이다.

블로그를 만들고 얼마 지나지 않아 철학의 정의에 대해 긴 글을 정리하다가 생각이 뒤죽박죽이라 비공개로 돌리고 모셔뒀었다. 핵심이라도 뽑아내서 간단하게 기록해두고 싶다. 철학은 무엇인가? 1. 철학은 '정명(正名)'하는 것이다. 2. 철학은 '생각의 기원을 거슬러 올라가는 작업'이다. 또는, '자신의 생각의 조건을 따져묻는 작업'이다.두 문장 모두 나의 문장이 아니고, 서로 다른 곳에서 마주쳤다. 여하튼간에 나는 위의 두 정의가 상호보완적이며 반드시 상보적인 것으로 이해되어야 한다고 생각한다.